October 4, 2006

Late yesterday, the Huffington Post put up a generous piece about the book and the blog. Most notably, they focused on one controversial passage (page 90-91) that has escaped others’ attention. For a section on 9/11’s impact on television, I interviewed Roger Ailes, head of FOX News, which celebrates its 10th anniversary today. What was the significance, I asked him, of two billion people being able to watch the same thing at the same time on September 11? His response was somewhat chilling. The passage:

“There were deeper and more disturbing repercussions, geopolitically and, to many, spiritually [about so many people watching the events simultaneously]. ‘The implications from a television standpoint,’ says Roger Ailes, chairman of FOX News and FOX Television Stations, ‘are simply that: When the end of the world comes, we’ll be able to cover it live until the last camera goes out. I believe I mean it literally. If you can witness something like [9/11] by two billion people, live, then there’s nothing that can’t be covered. And if we get into a world war, with nuclear weapons, I assume we’ll be covering it live.’

“Ailes, recognizing TV’s corporeal-world role, as it were, at the right hand of omniscience, speaks with a preacher’s reassurance and without an iota of irony when pondering the ultimate news story – a real-time Apocalypse Now: ‘It’s horrifying to think about. But maybe God set it up that way. You can either figure out how to live in freedom…and hope, or you can watch yourselves burn to death. Nine-eleven is a warning shot that says: Look, this can go either way. It’s your choice, folks.”

The religious implications of his statements were profound. Many Americans (I would go so far as to say a not insignificant portion of FOX News’s viewership) believe that the current battle against Islamist extremism and the wider conflict in Middle East somehow presage the coming of the End Times, when a global Savior will emerge out of the apocalyptic violence.

Not quite believing my ears, I was careful to ask him if he was discussing real-time coverage of a nuclear war in a figurative or literal way. Did he really mean that in the worst of worst-case scenarios, we’d be watching the End, live, on television? His response: “I believe I mean it literally.”

MEANWHILE, BACK ON THE BOOK TOUR…

Dozens of pre-teen girls, in town for a Junior Miss convention, scurried from room to room at the Fort Smith, Arkansas, Holiday Inn. Their giggles and footfalls echoed across the lobby’s vaulting atrium. Outside, at the hotel entrance, bikers in bandanas gathered; thousands were en route to a weekend gathering in nearby Fayettevile: Bikes, Blues & Bar-B-Que.

Welcome to Arkansas, Land of the Lost Book Signing.

On Saturday at the university bookstore, 55 books went in two hours. Each purchaser lingered, sharing a story, unsolicited, about September 11, as I inscribed each copy. On Sunday, at Books-A-Million, I had to noodge and wheedle to sign nine over the course of two long hours. Not that the store hadn’t set me up grandly, placing piles of books, and yours truly, at a polished display table, front and center. But it was a pristine Sunday, a day of rest, and even though the foot traffic was brisk, the patrons couldn’t be bothered with a man peddling 9/11.

“I only read the Bible,” said a self-described rock-quarry crusher, passing by the table. “No!” glowered a bearded young man in a T-shirt. “I was there. I worked down there.” One woman, upon seeing the book’s subtitle, merely raised her hand to shield her eyes, as she turned away, grimacing.

The glowerer would return a few minutes later to apologize. He just didn’t want to be reminded of September 11 – not on a quiet Sunday in out-of-the-way Fort Smith. He had been with the National Guard in 2001, he said. After having first been deployed to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, near the site where United 93 met its end, he was sent to Ground Zero to deal with security and crowd control. “People shouldn’t have to see what I saw,” he explained.

Before he turned to leave, he said that he had lost several friends in Iraq.